sustaining their energies through long hours of unremitting toil with only a few bowls of rice.'

Professor Pearson bears the same testimony.

'Flexible as Jews, they can thrive on the mountain plateaux of Tibet and under the sun of Singapore; more versatile even than Jews, they are excellent labourers, and not without merit as soldiers and sailors; while they have a capacity for trade which no other nation of the East possesses. They do not need even the accident of a man of genius to develop their magnificent future.'

Lafcadio Hearn speaks of them as

'a people of hundreds of millions disciplined for thousands of years to the most untiring industry and the most self-denying thrift, under conditions which would mean worse than death for our working masses-a people, in short, quite content to strive to the uttermost in exchange for the simple privilege of life.'

An American, Mr Clarence Poe, writes in 1911:

'We must face in ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awakening peoples who are strong with the strength which comes from poverty and hardship, and who have set themselves to master and apply all our secrets in the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy and for racial readjustment.'

Finally, to quote Mr Stoddard again :

'When the enormous outward thrust of coloured population-pressure bursts into a white land, it cannot let live, but automatically crushes the white man out-first the white labourer, then the white merchant, lastly the white aristocrat, until every vestige of white has gone from that land for ever.

Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, can white labour compete on equal terms with coloured immigrant labour.'

These warnings of the grim struggle which awaits the white races are confirmed by several concrete examples. In Hawaii the immigrants have been mainly Japanese, who are less formidable than the Chinese, as is shown by the fact that Japan has lately been compelled to pass laws for the exclusion of Chinese labour. Yet in those islands the Hawaiian fisherman and the American mechanic and shopkeeper have alike been pushed out of

employment. The Polynesian aborigines are withering away; the Americans are encysted as a small and dwindling aristocracy. In 1917, 5000 Japanese were born, and only 295 Americans. In Mauritius a century ago onethird of the population were whites, mostly French. 'To-day the fabled land of Paul and Virginia is becoming a bit of Hindustan, with a Chinese fringe.' Natal, which has recently passed an Exclusion Act, is a country of white landlords and supervisors controlling a horde of Asiatics. The working-class white population has to go.

These testimonies, which might easily be multiplied, and which are not contradicted, are sufficient to prove that under a régime of peace, free trade, and unrestricted migration the coloured races would outwork, underlive, and eventually exterminate the whites. The importance of this fact cannot be exaggerated. The result of the European, American, and Australian labour movement has been to produce a type of working-man who has no survival value, and who but for protection in its extremest form, the prohibition of immigration, would soon be swept out of existence. And this protection rests entirely on armed force; in the last resort, on war. It is useless to turn away from the facts, however unwelcome they may be to our socialists and pacificists. The abolition of war, and the establishment of a League to secure justice and equality of treatment for all nations, would seal the doom of the white labourer, such as he has made himself. There was a time when we went to war to compel the Chinese to trade with us, and when we ruined a flourishing Indian trade by the competition of Lancashire cotton. That was the period which it is the fashion to decry as a period of ruthless greed and exploitation. The working-man has brought that period to an end. To-day he is dreaming of fresh rewards, doles, and privileges which are to make the white countries a paradise for his class. And all the time he is living on sufferance, behind an artificial dyke of ironclads and bayonets, on the other side of which is a mass of far more efficient labour, which would swallow him up in a generation if the barriers were removed.

The American books from which quotations have

*Neame, 'Oriental Labour in South Africa.'

been made are written with the object of urging a policy
of absolute exclusion. This is the remedy, and the only
remedy, which finds favour in the United States, in
British Columbia, in Australia, and in South Africa.
There is probably no question on which the people of
those countries are so nearly unanimous. 'The White
Australia doctrine,' says one Australian writer, 'is based
on the necessity for choosing between national existence
and suicide.' Another says, 'Australians of all classes
and political affiliations regard the [exclusion] policy
much as Americans regard the Constitution.'
'Take
down the barriers on the Pacific Coast, and there
would be ten million Hindus in Canada in ten years.'
A Californian echoes this Canadian protest: 'The
multitudes of Asia are awake after their long sleep, as
the multitudes of Europe were when our present flood of
immigration began. We know what would happen on
the Asiatic side, by what did happen on the European
side. Against Asiatic immigration we could not survive.'
And so a policy, which is rather time-discredited than
time-honoured, is to be adopted, to preserve the white
man in his half-empty Garden of Eden. As the Baby-
lonians built the so-called Median Wall to keep out the
roving nomads from the North, as the Chinese built their
wonderful Great Wall to keep out the Tartars, as the
Romans carried a line of fortifications from Newcastle to
the Solway, so the white man is to erect a permanent
barrier to exclude the Asiatic. All the under-populated
countries are in the hands of the whites, and the overflow
of China, Japan, and India is never to be allowed to reach
them.

To

Is it likely that this policy will be successful? begin with, it has all the well-known drawbacks of a protective system. In the protected countries the cost of living is forced up, and the consumer is deprived of the advantage which he might have gained from competition, in all trades where the home labourer can determine prices. Under this system the cost of labour has become so high that much of the wealth in the protected countries remains undeveloped. In the State of New York, and in other parts of the Union, the visitor is surprised to see many derelict farms. The explanation is that the cost of labour is so great that it pays to Vol. 235.-No. 467.

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cultivate only the best land. Further west, magnificent crops of fruit rot on the trees; there is no one to pick them. The slow growth of Australia and New Zealand is the result of the absence of cheap labour. In our own country an impasse has plainly been reached. Unemployment is increasing, and must increase much further. No houses can be built for rents which the occupants could pay. The high cost of coal impoverishes the population and cripples all industries. The Government has no remedy except to endow the unemployed out of the taxes and to build houses out of the rates; though it must be clear even to the least intelligent member of the least intelligent House of Commons that has ever sat that every five pounds so spent drives another workman out of employment for a week. Quite apart from Asiatic competition, our social order is on the verge of bankruptcy. By a well-known law of nature, a nation shielded from healthy competition becomes more and more inefficient, and less able to stand against its rivals when the protecting barriers fail.

As the conditions in the white countries become more and more unfavourable to enterprise, we may be sure that both capital and business ability will be transferred to the economically strong countries. Asia will be industrialised; India and China and Japan will be full of factories, equipped with all the latest improvements, and under skilled management, which at first will be frequently white. Wealth will be so abundant in Asia that the Governments will be able without difficulty to maintain fleets and armies large enough to protect their own interests, and to exact reparation for any transgressions of international law by the whites. Only a wealthy country can be powerful by sea; and a nation which has lost most of its foreign trade will not think it worth while to bid for naval supremacy. The policy of exclusion will, therefore, be powerless to prevent those races which possess economic superiority from increasing in wealth and then in military power.

The suicidal war which devastated the world of the white man for four years will probably be found to have produced its chief results, not in altering the balance of power in Europe, but in precipitating certain changes which were coming about slowly during the peace. The

period which these changes would naturally have occupied was shortened by perhaps fifty years. The first of these is the change in the relation of wages to output, which has been suddenly and enormously altered to the detriment of the manufacturer and the consumer, as the result of the war. The white workman can now live only under sheltered and privileged conditions. In England he is living on the remains of the old wealth of the country, which, as we are beginning to discover, has been almost entirely destroyed under the present Government. The second change is the transference of political and financial supremacy from Europe to the United States, a change which was no doubt bound to occur within half a century, since America has a decisive advantage in her geographical position, equally adapted for the Pacific and the Atlantic trade. The present writer, when he was at Berlin two or three years before the war, had a conversation with a leading German publicist, and endeavoured to impress upon him that in the event of a European war, the American would inevitably be the tertius gaudens. The argument, though absolutely sound, as the event has proved, was not very well received. Europe has thrown away her last halfcentury of primacy. The third change is that to which this article is directed. The peril from the coloured races, which before the war loomed in the distance, is now of immediate urgency. The white peoples, exhausted and crippled by debt, will be less than ever able to compete with Asia.

The policy of exclusion, however, must be considered as it affects the white nations separately, for the problem is not the same all over the world. In North America it is probable that the immigration of Chinese, Japanese, and Indians may be successfully resisted. Employers of labour may complain with good reason that they are unable to develop their businesses; but the labour vote will be far too strong for them. The Americans are beginning to realise that their promiscuous hospitality to immigrants, even from Europe, has fatally impaired the racial integrity of their nation, and has been accompanied by a great reduction in the birth-rate of the old Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Dutch stock. Only in